Friday, June 12, 2015

Two observations on which most writers and critics agree
about V.S. Pritchett are: (1) He was one
of England's best short-story writers. (2) He has always been unfairly
ignored.

Dean R. Baldwin, in one of the few studies of
Pritchett (V.S. Pritchett. Boston: Twayne, 1987), rightly observes that neglect
of Pritchett is largely due to the fact that his most lasting contribution are
his short stories. The fact that "neglect" and "short
stories" somehow often seem to be linked should be no surprise to readers
of this blog, who know that short stories have often been ignored because of a
critical bias for the big over the small, action over language, and the social
over the artistic.

Because I have battled these biases throughout my
career, I am always delighted when a publisher has the gumption to go against
them and makes forgotten short-story writers newly available.

Turnpike Books
(London), who has previously published handy handsome paperback collections of
A.E. Coppard (Weep Not My Wanton) and
J. B. Priestly (What a Life!), has
now published a selection of eight stories by V.S. Priestly entitled On the Edge of the Cliff. They were kind enough to send me a copy. I posted an essay on the Coppard collection
earlier on this blog.

Not to be
confused with a Random House 1979 edition of the same name (the title of one of
the stories), Turnpike's edition of On
the Edge of the Cliff, contains eight of Pritchett's most memorable
stories. In addition to the title story: "Wheelbarrow,"
"Citizen," "The Wedding," "The Speech," "A
Debt of Honor," "The Cage Birds," and "The Skeleton."

If you associate British short stories with genteel
drawing room comedies or superficial social satires, then you haven't read V.
S. Pritchett. In the opening story, "Wheelbarrow," for example, the
central character is a "natural destroyer," who looks like some
"hard-living, hard-bitten doll," a taxi-driver, who
"captures" a woman and takes over assisting her ready an inherited
house for sale. Squatting like an imp or devil, he tells her about a vision he
had in a mine that converts him from being a gambler and a fornicator to a
pious Christian. The story becomes a back-and-forth battle between the two
involving temptation, lust, coveting, avarice. It is a classic example of how
the short story creates a "realistic" story that is simultaneously a
mythic story that focuses on the "secret life."

Adrian Hunter, in his 2007 book, The Cambridge Introduction to the Short
Story in English, suggests that Pritchett regards the short story
"fundamentally at odds with the English cultural imaginary," which is
ruminative. Hunter explains Pritchett's failure to find respect in the academy
by locating him unpalatably between modernist formalism and old fashioned
social satire.

In the Introduction to the Oxford Book of Short Stories (1981), Pritchett says the short story
springs from a poetic rather than a prosaic impulse, which suggests that things
that are left out are there all the time and that it approaches the
mythical. The short story writer, he
says is not sustained by the discursive like the novelist but rather the distinctiveness
of his voice and the ingenuity of his design. He says a good storyteller knows
he is putting on a "personal, individual act." The short story, says Pritchett, knows that
our "restless lives achieve shape at times and our emotions have their
architecture."

In one of the
most recent pieces on Pritchett, (New
Statesman, 6 February 2012), the great short story writer William Trevor
agrees with Elizabeth Bowen that the form is "a child of our time,"
at the very "heart of modernity" in its "matter-of-fact brevity,"
its "sense of urgency, its glimpsing manner, its stab of truth." All of this, he says, was waiting for V.S.
Pritchett, who "gratefully reached out for it, prized it, and indelibly
left his mark on it." And indeed, Pritchett has shown himself more
appreciative and proficient in the unique characteristics of the short story
than most British writers of the twentieth century.

In a 1953 piece in Harper's Bazaar, Pritchett noted that whereas novels are bemusing,
the short story, on the other hand," wakes the reader up.” Like other short story writers before and
after him, Pritchett argues that the form answers the "primitive craving
for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic
pattern and significance in our experience."

In a 1985 interview (John Haffenden, Novelists in
Interview. NY: Methuen), he says he likes Chekhov's stories because
they are so open-ended and he tries to do that too, to leave things
hanging. "it's terribly difficult
for English writers to do, since some sort of practical or responsible sense
works against it. We tend to lack the
courage to leave it like that, and we don't know what 'that' is."

In the same interview, Pritchett says, "Writing
short stories is like writing sonnets or a lyrical poem: it's strictly
disciplined, it has to be highly concentrated, and it has to suggest a world
much larger than it appears to be doing in its space.... I have always wanted
to pursue intensity, and a long time ago I became infatuated with the Idea of
'essences'--essences of behavior--which I got out of reading Croce in Spanish. Croce
made a great impression on me as a young man, and I thought: 'Yes, I don't want
the whole cake, I want the essence.'"

Pritchett says one of the delightful things about
the short story is it is like looking a picture, for you can see the whole
thing at once. He also says its intensity attracts him. In his introduction to
a collection of Mary Lavin's stories, he said that the Irish short story writer
tends to concentrate on the discrepancy between ordinary, everyday life and the
self's hidden life."

In the Preface to his Collected Stories (1982), Pritchett talked about how story-writing
was "exacting work," and that so-called "real life" is
"useless until art reveals what life merely suggested." He says that
although he laboured at novels, he was really attracted to "concision,
intensity, reducing possible novels to essentials." He adds that he has
always thought the short-story writer is a mixture of reporter, aphoristic wit,
moralist and poet—though not "poetical." He says the short-story
writer is like a ballad-maker and in the intricacy of his designs like a writer
of sonnets, like an architect. The short
story, he argues, is not simply read, but re-read again and again.

If you are familiar with my own discussions of the
short story in this blog, and in my essays, reviews, and books, you will also
find Pritchett's comments on the form familiar. The characteristics of the form
Pritchett identifies, and which I have argued for over the years are as
follows:

1.The
short story is poetic rather than prosaic.

2.Things
that seem left out are there all the time in short stories.

3.The
short story approaches the mythical.

4.The
short story is sustained by the distinctiveness
of the writer's voice.

5.The
short story is sustained by ingenuity of its design.

6.A
good storyteller knows he is putting on a "personal, individual act."

7.The
short story knows that our lives achieve shape at times and our emotions have their architecture.

8.The
short story reflects a primitive craving for art and beauty of shape, the
longing to see a dramatic pattern
and significance in our experience.

10.The short story
must suggest a world larger than it appears to be doing.

11.The short story is
not simply read, but re-read again and again.

12.The short story
deals with "essences" of behavior.

If
you appreciate the short story and have not read V. S. Pritchett's short
stories, Turnpike Books' Edge of the
Cliff is a good place to start. He knew the form well—perhaps too well to
be well-received by popular readers who prefer long rambling "real life" or academic
critics who prefer social significance.

2 comments:

I was reading an old NYer article (Louis Menand) on the art of short fiction (mostly about Updike) and it digs into the "magic" I have resigned myself into accepting about a "great" short story. Here are excerpts: " [referring to baseball players]...a disproportion mastered by a difficult but, to the ordinary observer, almost invisible technique...a short story's aim is to create an 'effect,' by which [Edgar Allen] Poe meant something almost physical...in the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated...a general sense of Whoa!, not exactly a term of art. You know it when you feel it though...the whole idea is to make language perform its own little supernatural act..you could say the complexity of the machinery used to produce this is hidden beneath the surface of the writing, expect that the writing is the machinery just as sex is only bodies."

I was lucky to pick up 3 volumes of Pritchett's work when my local library had a de-accessioning sale. I'll be taking the Collected Stories volume on my vacation. Thanks for the Pritchett essay as well as the short story month essays.

Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

Friday, Nov. 16, is the tenth anniversary of my blog. I have been taking some time off because I have been working on a new book on the short story. I have submitted a proposal to a publisher and am waiting for a reply. I will let you know when I hear from them. Thank you for continuing to read essays in my archives.

Now Available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle

Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."